Tallow's Trial

He spent twenty years on a kill floor. She spent her whole life behind a cutting block. Some people speak the same language before they ever say a word.

Lucy Herrera is the second-generation owner of Herrera's Meats — a South Side butcher shop her father opened in 1982. She came home to save it when his stroke took his hands and his voice, and she's been running it alone ever since. Clean cuts, fair prices, and the trust of every abuelita in the neighborhood.

Then Arturo Mendez decides he wants her cooler.

Disrupted suppliers. Manufactured violations. A pig's head on her cutting block with a message carved into her beef. Mendez has been running stolen merchandise through South Side businesses for years, and the butcher who said no is about to find out what happens next.

Tallow is the enforcer for the Ghosts of the Alamo MC, and Herrera's Meats sits on Ghost ground. When he walks in for his weekly order and finds Lucy scrubbing blood off her father's block, he picks up the pig's head and carries it to the dumpster — because a man who spent twenty years on a processing floor doesn't stand idle while someone else handles offal.

Lucy doesn't want a protector. She wants a man who understands that her shop isn't a business — it's a legacy. What she gets is a quiet, heavy-handed outlaw who reads her scars the way he reads his own.

And when Mendez sends his men to terrorize her father in his wheelchair, the conversation stops being about a cooler.

When the fencing operation comes for everything she's built, Lucy and Tallow will fight back with fists, blades, and a love forged over cutting blocks and coffee that neither of them saw coming.

Tallow's Trial is Book 10 in the Ghosts of the Alamo MC series. Full-length MC romance. Complete standalone with a guaranteed HEA.